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Re: Batch installation, possibly without setup.exe?


> if I want to install a version of Cygwin without user
> interaction (optimally just dropping a bunch of files
> via unzip), is that feasible?

I do this frequently in order to have Cygwin on a USB stick. Building it there using setup would take 2 days (even though it's USB2.0). Copying an existing architecture to it takes less than an hour. It works perfectly, scores of times.

Build your preferred version on a host machine. Then Yes, as long as the zipped package that you are copying from host to target is capable of preserving the +R and +S attributes that will be attached to some of the individual files.

> In particular: does setup.exe fiddle with the registry
> or other files that can't be just overwritten as a whole?

Mainly (entirely?) setup sees to (a) location and (b) mounts. The first (a) is attended to by the fact that you are copying a completely specified architecture from host to target. However (b) you do need to remount your installation once it's in place. You could achieve this with a single once-only .bat command tacked on to the un-zipping process.

> Obviously, one might want to have PATH adjusted, but apart
> from that?

Why? If your PATH e.g.

/home/user/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

(or whatever) works on the host, why would you want to change it on the target?

After it's done you might want to fiddle with mkpasswd or mkgroup for individual users on their individual machines, but it's my experience* that you wouldn't actually need to.

* What Works For Me might not, for You. And I might have misunderstood what you want.

Fergus



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